The house was 284 Green Street, Enfield, a three-bedroom council semi. Peggy Hodgson, divorced, lived there with four children: Margaret, thirteen; Janet, eleven; and two younger brothers, John and Billy. John was away at a boarding school for much of the year. Next door at 282 were Vic Nottingham, a builder, his wife Peggy, and their son Gary.

On the evening of 31 August 1977, around half past nine, Janet and John said they heard shuffling in the bedroom. Their mother came in. The three of them reported knocking, and a chest of drawers that shifted about eighteen inches with nobody touching it. They went next door. Vic and Gary Nottingham came back with them, heard more knocks, and could not find a source. Peggy Nottingham called the police.

WPC Caroline Heeps and PC Hyams arrived about 1 a.m. on 1 September. Heeps’s written statement, which gives the street as Wood Street, says the family told her strange things had been happening for several nights and that they thought the house was haunted. With the living-room lights off she heard four taps on the wall backing onto the neighbors, then four more from another wall. The other constable and the neighbors checked the walls, the loft, and the pipes and found nothing that would account for them. They went into the kitchen. Heeps stayed in the living room with the family. The lights went off again. She wrote that the eldest boy pointed to a chair by the sofa, that she saw it wobble, and that it then slid three to four feet toward the kitchen wall without leaving the floor. She checked the chair and found nothing to explain the slide. Nothing further happened while the police were there.

Over the next days the family and the Nottinghams reported marbles and Lego bricks flying in the house. On 4 September Peggy Nottingham rang the Daily Mirror. Reporter Douglas Bence and photographer Graham Morris came. Morris said a piece of Lego hit him on the forehead hard enough to leave a bruise he could still see days later. On 7 September senior reporter George Fallows came with photographer David Thorpe. Fallows later wrote that the mood in the house and the street made a clean record difficult, that his team could imitate most of what they had been shown, and that he did not think the whole of it was trickery unless an expert was doing the faking.

Fallows asked the Society for Psychical Research for help. The secretary, Eleanor O’Keeffe, put him in touch with Maurice Grosse, an inventor who had lately joined the Society and offered to take a case. Grosse came on 5 September. On 8 September he and three Mirror people reported a loud crash. He took the case on. Guy Lyon Playfair, answering Grosse’s request for another pair of hands, arrived on 12 September with Rosalind Morris of BBC Radio 4. The two men stayed with it for more than a year: about 180 visits and 25 nights spent in the house, and something over 180 hours of tape.

What they logged, in their own notes and in Playfair’s book This House Is Haunted (1980), includes knocks, doors and drawers opening, marbles that were said to land without rolling, a fireplace frame pulled out of the wall, small fires that went out, and Janet found in places she said she had not walked to. Morris’s photographs show her in the air above a bed. Melvin Harris, writing in the Society’s journal in 1980, read those frames as the girls jumping and throwing bedding. Playfair answered that the pillow and the curtain do not travel the way a throw would send them.

In December 1977 a harsh, low voice began to come from Janet, after a spell of whistles and barking. It called itself Bill Wilkins. Questioned by Grosse’s son Richard, a solicitor, it said it had gone blind, had a haemorrhage, and had died in a chair in the corner downstairs. Playfair wrote that a Mr Wilkins had been the previous occupant and had died in the house, and that Janet had not seemed to know that. Grosse taped her mouth and, on other occasions, had her hold water in it, and said the voice still came, quieter. In January 1978 Margaret produced a similar voice, shorter and weaker. A contact microphone on the back of Janet’s head picked up a louder sound than her ordinary speech. Physicist John Hasted and phonetician Adrian Fourcin, using a laryngograph, found the pattern called plica ventricularis, a throat tension that can make a second tone. They noted that this usually brings weeks of hoarseness, which Janet did not have. Ventriloquist Ray Alan thought the sound was being driven from the diaphragm. Grosse offered £500, later £1,000, to a charity if a child could match the voice on his terms. Nobody took the bet. In 1996 Terry Wilkins, the son, told a film crew that his father had died in that house in the way the voice had described.

Grosse and Playfair wrote that Margaret and Janet did try to trick them, that the tries were few, and that the girls owned up when caught. A video camera in the next room caught Janet bending spoons and working at an iron bar. Grosse said he found her banging a broom on the ceiling and hiding his recorder. Anita Gregory, who came in December 1977 with John Beloff, reviewed Playfair’s book in 1980 and was not persuaded. She wrote that the girls liked the play-acting, that Peggy’s brother John Burcombe had told her Janet taught herself the deep voice, and that Peggy Nottingham had told her the later stretch was nonsense kept going by the investigators. Grosse and Playfair disputed those remarks. The Nottinghams signed statements that they had not made the story up. In May 1978 an Society committee, Mary Rose Barrington, Hugh Pincott, Peter Hallson, and John Stiles, interviewed witnesses and said some of the testimony was clear. They would not treat Janet’s other voice as established.

The disturbances dropped off through 1978. Peggy Hodgson avoided the press after that and did not take back her account. She died in 2003. In the Daily Mail on 28 October 2011 Janet, then forty-five, said she and Margaret had cheated about two percent of the time. She also said the voice still came when her mouth was full of water, and that the lifts off the bed had frightened her because she did not know where she would land.